Motoya Nakamura, The OregonianUrsula K. Le Guin at home in Northwest Portland. "I'm an extremely private person," Le Guin says. "No heart on a sleeve."In Ursula K. Le Guin's living room, there's a clock that chimes every 15 minutes. She takes no notice of it, other than to raise her voice slightly to make herself heard over the familiar sound. She's lived in the same house near Forest Park for 50 years and knows just when the morning sunlight will fall across the room and leave a shadow behind.

Le Guin is 80 and sometimes uses her age as an excuse not to do things she wouldn't do anyway -- travel, sign books, stay out late. She doesn't think older is necessarily wiser: "If you're stupid, you're probably just as stupid at 80 as you were at 79."

It's not so easy for her to get around, and everyday chores take a little longer, but the light in her eyes is as bright as ever. Her life is rich with the rewards that come to her as the Queen Mother of Science Fiction, and she accepts them graciously while maintaining her fiesty edge and waiting for what she wants more than anything -- another novel.

After more than 50 books of every kind (novels, story collections, poetry, essays, children's books, criticism, translations), Le Guin thinks she might be finished with fiction. Or fiction might be finished with her. Two years ago, she published "Lavinia," a novel based on a minor character in the "Aeneid" that she thinks is as good as anything she's ever done. Since then, Le Guin hasn't written another novel and wonders whether she ever will. There haven't been any short stories for several years, and the room where she keeps her wonderful imagination sits empty.

Torsten Kjellstrand, The OregonianUrsula K. Le Guin reads "A Ride on the Red Mare's Back" at Reed College."There seems to be nothing to follow at this point except poetry," Le Guin says. "I do not seem to have a story to tell, which is very disappointing and upsetting to me because I love to write and I know how to do it."

Le Guin says this matter-of-factly, with no alarm or self-pity. She knows from experience that it doesn't do any good to sit down and force herself to create; if she does, "it's dead on the page.

"If I haven't got a story to write, I haven't got a story to write," Le Guin says. "I hope it isn't permanent but I wouldn't be surprised."

Just like that, the skills that Le Guin has been perfecting since she submitted her first story to Astounding Science Fiction magazine at age 11 are idle. She still writes poetry and essays and criticism, and chips away at the mountain of mail that never seems to grow smaller, but it's not the same as conjuring up characters and turning them loose in a new world of her own design.

Nobel Prize winner José Saramago, Le Guin notes with envy, is 87 and still writing good novels. What can she do while she waits for her muse to return?

Le Guin could sit and reflect on her accomplishments, the National Book Award and all the Nebulas and Hugos and Gandalfs and other exotic-sounding science-fiction honors she's received, but she's never lived in the past and only goes back when she's asked about it. Publishers want her to write a memoir, but she just can't do it.

She can do readings and public appearances, like the ones she did recently at Reed College with the Third Angle New Music Ensemble and at Powell's for an anthology of anarchist literature, as long as she doesn't have to get on a plane. Le Guin loves answering questions and "being a ham" in front of an audience but doesn't like sitting for hours and signing books. She's a private person, and it's not easy meeting strangers, even if they want to tell her how much they love her work.

And Le Guin can step up as a leader in a bitter, complicated legal fight against Google over its digital scanning of millions of books. In December, Le Guin publicly resigned from the Authors Guild in protest over its settlement with Google and got 367 other authors to sign a petition asking a federal judge to exempt the U.S. from the settlement. She refers to the case as "the Google book grab" and believes "the whole principle of copyright is being brushed aside and a corporation is getting to write the rules."

Most authors have little understanding of the issues involved in the Google settlement. Most 80-year-olds wouldn't think of taking on one of the richest and most powerful corporations in the world. Le Guin researched the case, took a stand and started swinging.

"That's Ursula, isn't it?" says Molly Gloss, a Portland writer who was mentored by Le Guin. "When she feels strongly, she can get up on a high horse and gallop off, and you'd better get out of the way."

"Then there is also that gap between the young student and the old teacher, which all teachers, if they're honest, worry about," she says. "The language has begun to change, literally. You may be going along saying things that are perfectly clear to you and they don't know what you're saying, and vice versa."

Students today love to write first-person narratives, a natural tendency that's been encouraged by social networking and the Internet. True, Le Guin says, but young writers -- and older ones -- have always wanted to write about themselves. She's just never joined them. For all the writing she's done and all the genres she's mastered, memoir escapes her.

"A couple of times I've tried," she says. "I thought I should write something about my childhood. It's an interesting childhood. A rather quiet one but an interesting one. But I just can't do it. I get bored or self-conscious, my writing begins to gnarl up and I drop it. If writing memoir means that you can see the story in your own life, I don't have that gift."

Le Guin is the daughter of Alfred Kroeber, one of the great anthropologists in American history, and Theodora Kroeber, whose "Ishi in Two Worlds" is a moving and influential book about Native American assimilation. The Kroeber family spent its summers at a ranch called Kishamish in the Napa Valley where guests included a stimulating assortment of prominent scientists, Kroeber's students from the University of California at Berkeley, and Native Americans.

Ursula Kroeber grew up absorbing a wide range of ideas about culture and language and mythology that later filtered into her fiction. She met Charles Le Guin, a historian, on the Queen Mary when they were on Fulbright Fellowships in 1953 and married him in Paris a few months later. They moved to Portland in 1958 when Charles Le Guin began teaching history at Portland State and raised three children in the house with a view of Mount St. Helens.

Poetry came first in Le Guin's career, followed by stories that couldn't find a home until she went back to her childhood love of science fiction, a field that was completely dominated by men and ignored by the literary establishment. Her first fiction publication was in Fantastic Stories magazine, and her first novel, "Rocannon's World," was one-half of a mass-market paperback.

Le Guin wrote at a furious pace, usually in the evenings after her children were asleep. "A Wizard of Earthsea," the first novel in the six-volume Earthsea series, came in 1968, followed by her best-known book, "The Left Hand of Darkness," in 1969. She bounced easily between fantasy and science fiction and scored another huge triumph with "The Lathe of Heaven," set in a near-future but recognizable Portland. "Searoad," a collection of realist short fiction set on the Oregon coast, is another of Le Guin's books that is grounded here.

All her work has deep roots in the West, and she has fought her entire career against the East Coast domination of the publishing industry. Le Guin has received honorary degrees from four Oregon colleges and served on the Multnomah County Library board. There has never been another Oregon writer like her.

By the time "The Dispossessed" was published in 1974, Le Guin was on her way to becoming the most honored woman in the history of science fiction and fantasy. Throughout her career, she broke barriers for women writers while attracting positive attention from critics who'd never taken genre fiction seriously.

When Tony Wolk, an English professor at Portland State, started a science-fiction course in the late 1960s, it was only allowed during summer session because studying science fiction was considered beneath the regular curriculum and wouldn't attract committed students.

"It's the opposite," Wolk says. "It attracts the best students in the university and still does. I'm teaching a class on Philip K. Dick and the quality of the work is extraordinary, and I don't have to encourage them to turn it in."

Wolk became friendly with Le Guin, and they've taught together over the years. He sometimes invites her to speak to one of his classes after they've read one of her books, an experience they treasure.

"For someone who teaches Shakespeare or Dante, you can't get those writers," he says.

Le Guin loves it because the students always have a fresh perspective on her work. She gets a little frustrated because her later work is often overlooked in college courses and "sometimes it seemed as if nobody was reading anything I'd written since about 1968. No, 1988. ... I did some really good books, you know. Why are you ignoring them?"

On a rainy afternoon in January, Le Guin walks into Kaul Auditorium on the Reed College campus. Rehearsals for the evening's performance by the Third Angle New Music Ensemble are running late, and she sits quietly and rests until the musicians are ready. She'll be reading her children's story "A Ride on the Red Mare's Back" while the ensemble plays an original score by Bryan Johanson, a music professor at Portland State. Le Guin is calm as the ensemble sets up, but when artistic director Ron Blessinger says, "And now for something completely different," Le Guin is ready with her own Monty Python reference.

"Number one, the larch," she says, and smiles broadly.

It's the punch line to a skit called "How to Recognize Different Types of Trees From a Long Way Away." No one gets it, and Le Guin reads her story crisply while the musicians work out their cues and then asks, "Are we going to practice our bows?" She sounds great at the rehearsal, then tells everyone she's reading at half-strength and is saving her voice for the performance.

That evening, Blessinger tells the audience it's been his dream for 10 years to have Le Guin read with Johanson's music. She knows when it's showtime, and starts her story with just the right tone. "A long time ago when the world was wild. ..."

Everything goes without a hitch. Le Guin puts extra depth and emotion into the lines "TROLLS took him" and "my BRAVE daughter." The musicians don't miss a cue, and no one stumbles while taking a bow.

A few nights earlier at Powell's City of Books, the atmosphere is much rowdier. More than 200 people pack the Pearl Room to hear Le Guin read from her work and talk with Margaret Killjoy, a young man who edited "Mythmakers & Lawbreakers: Anarchist Writers on Fiction," an anthology that includes an interview with Le Guin. It's the biggest crowd she's ever attracted at Powell's, Le Guin says before the event starts, and there's no way she can stay and sign everyone's book. She explains to the audience:

"When you get over 80, things get harder to do."

Once things get rolling, Le Guin is in a great mood. The woman who introduces her says something about not liking science fiction, and Le Guin grins and hisses. She starts by reading from "The Dispossessed," calling it "the first and so far as I know the only anarchist Utopia." Next is a reading from "Always Coming Home" (1985), set in a fictional Napa Valley and called by its author "a real mess and much more deeply anarchist" than "The Dispossessed."

Killjoy, who wears a kilt and has dreadlocks, calls himself Magpie when he plays the accordion. He helps edit SteamPunk Magazine and maintains a blog of erotica called Steamypunk. He gives a loose, knowledgeable overview of anarchist literature and tells a story about Kurt Vonnegut Jr. being asked, "Why are you ruining the youth of America?" and walking away in disgust.

A few minutes later, after Killjoy talks about Tolstoy and writers who explicitly identify as anarchists, he pauses and takes a drink of water.

"Why are you ruining the youth of America?" Le Guin calls out, laughing.

Questions come thick and fast from the audience. Killjoy makes the point that anarchy and organization are not contradictory and that anarchists are productive people who get things done without a government structure. Someone asks about the role of anarchism in the 1999 World Trade Organization protests in Seattle and in a 1993 incident with police in Portland. Le Guin responds:

"As an inveterate peace marcher ... I've marched around Portland more times than anyone in this room except my husband. I did get cross with the self-styled anarchists, the noisy 'look at me' people, whereas just as Margaret said, a lot of the organizers and people who were keeping it so it worked were also anarchists."

A long question is summed up as, "What do you see role as?"

"What's our cellular purpose?" Killjoy asks.

"To try to maybe show that there are alternatives to the way we presently do things and that people think is the only way to do things," Le Guin says. "Democracy is good but it isn't the only way to achieve justice and a fair share.

"This basically requires science fiction, but things are changing. Fiction is loosening up. Science fiction is working pretty close toward being the norm. Watch out when that happens. It won't be fun anymore."

Le Guin says she read all the anarchist literature available to her before she wrote "The Dispossessed." Her own beliefs are infused by Taoism; she did a translation of the "Tao Te Ching" by Lao Tzu and thinks "they just hook by nature. They're like Velcro, anarchism and Taoism."

Back at home, she says, she "never called myself an anarchist because I'm a bourgeois. I don't live the anarchist lifestyle. My inner German probably wouldn't allow it. ... One problem with being aged is sometimes young people perceive a gulf. Whether it's really there or not, they perceive that that person's so old they couldn't possibly have anything to do with me. That gulf can be unreachable."

Does being bourgeois and materialist eliminate the possibility of being an anarchist?

"No. But it's kind of a lifestyle thing. How much are you really willing to share? Do you want a lot of people in your house, like to live communally? You know, there are all kinds of anarchist lifestyles, but I'd say this house could only be an anarchist house if it had about eight more people, at least, in it."

At the end of the question-and-answer session at Powell's, Le Guin asks "to do a little PR, really quickly," and urges any published writers in the audience to sign her petition opposing the Google settlement.

"I think this is a really important fight against a corporation that is, with some good intentions, rumbling like a stegosaurus into the whole world of writing, not only on the Web but some books on paper," she says.

The Google settlement is about Google's digital scanning of millions of books in order to create an online library. The Authors Guild sued Google, but the guild and the Association of American Publishers later settled with the company. A federal district judge has to approve the settlement, and the Justice Department has objected to what it calls 'an end-run around copyright law." A decision is not expected for several weeks.

Le Guin can go on at length about what's wrong with the Google settlement and how "the whole principle of copyright is being kind of brushed aside." Every few minutes, she'll pause and mention that the issues are complicated, then pick up where she left off. She admits that her "combative streak" and "windmill climbing ... this is Dona Quixote here" are well-suited to a scrap with Google and bursts out laughing at the thought of Google contacting her.

"They don't notice gnats," she says. "They talk to China. I hope they know that I'm not anti-Google. I love my search engine. It's an awfully good one. I just think they did the wrong thing here and they've got to be stopped."

The clock chimes again. Le Guin has to leave for a lunch appointment in a few minutes. A question about her literary legacy stops her short. For Le Guin, the answer to what she's done and what it means is simple.

"Well, I like my books," she says. "I never look to the future. People always tell me I write about the future. I've never written about the future. I don't know anything about the future. The future, as Milan Kundera said, is a big blank bore. We don't know what it is. To me it's all a big metaphor, spaceships or other planets or other people, a metaphor for now. If this applies to my own future, and the future of my books, I have no ... I'm not very good at looking back and I'm not very good at looking ahead."